Who’s a bigger threat to world peace: ISIS or the United
States? Everyone from EU bureaucrats to Iraqi shopkeepers to Hong Kong
democracy activists to Canadian grade-schoolers knows the answer—everyone, that
is, except America’s best and brightest college students. According to a
sampling of students at Harvard University, the United States—the nation that
ended the Third Reich, crushed Japanese militarism, refashioned those regimes
into peaceful and prosperous democracies, created the UN, shielded the West
from Stalinism, and serves as civilization’s first responder and last line of
defense—does more to undermine world peace than ISIS—the mass-murdering jihadist
group that has hanged, beheaded, slaughtered and terrorized its way across a
vast swath of Iraq and Syria.

It gets worse.

In responding to the question posed by Campus Reform, a higher-education
watchdog, Harvard students explained that “American imperialism and our
protection of oil interests in the Middle East are destabilizing the region,”
that “we’re to blame for a lot of the problems that we’re facing now,” that
“outlandish” spending on “defense mechanisms” by the U.S. contributes to global
problems, that “Americans have a skewed view of ISIS.”

This is just the latest example of what postmodern thinking is
doing to our society. Postmodernism is a philosophy based on the
notion that all truth is relative. Where modernism held that there are
scientific, philosophical and moral truths which explain everything for
everyone, postmodernism says, “You have your truth. I have mine. But there is
no universal truth.” Postmodernism is
based on feeling and individual experience, rejecting the collective wisdom
gathered by others.

The corrosive effects of postmodernism are predictable and
pervasive: We see its impact in academia, which, oblivious to the irony,
teaches young minds there is no absolute truth except one—the absolute which
declares there are no absolutes; in pop culture, where the only wrong behavior
is judging something to be wrong; in our civic life, where, as historian John
Lewis Gaddis suggests, our eagerness “to question all values” has undermined “our faith in and our determination to
defend certain values”; in Western
civilization, where, as illustrated at Harvard, the healthy practice of
self-criticism has led to moral relativism, cognitive confusion and a kind of cultural suicide.

As a university lecturer, I see postmodernism’s impact on
students in the way students seldom take a position unless forced to do so. Sadly,
many students struggle to answer normative questions—questions that require the
student to state something to be right or wrong, good or evil. And many others,
after years of being marinated in our postmodern
culture, succumb to moral relativism, as the survey of Harvard students
reveals.

Of course, it’s not just students. Not long ago, the Goshen
College Board of Directors decided to ban “The Star Spangled Banner” from
on-campus sporting events. The National Anthem, in the school’s view, is
“inconsistent” with the school’s values. A statementfrom the tiny Mennonite school in rural Indiana explained that the board of
trustees wanted an alternative that “resonates with Goshen College’s core
values and respects the views of diverse constituencies.” “Mennonites,” added
one Goshen student,
“appreciate America but also don’t want to have that violence.”

As a matter of fact, “The Star Spangled Banner” is not about
violence or promoting war. It’s actually about freedom and peace. All you have
to do is read Francis Scott Key’s poem to
understand that.

“Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light what so
proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?”

Key was asking if the flag was still flying—and more
specifically, if his country was still free. After all, America, his homeland,
was under attack. He saw Washington set ablaze. He saw “the bombs bursting in
air.” And when he learned that “our flag” was “still there,” he was overjoyed,
as the stanzas that follow reveal. “Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s
first beam, in full glory reflected now shines in the stream: ‘Tis the
star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave o’er the land of the free and the
home of the brave!”

To be sure, Key penned the poem after a battle. And we can
gather from context that he didn’t view war as the enemy. But neither was he
glorifying war or violence. In fact, he was celebrating his freedom and his
country’s independence from an enemy that brought “the havoc of war” to
America’s shores.

In other words, it may not mean much to those who confuse
moral relativism for wisdom, but freedom isn’t preserved by student protests, international
treaties, UN resolutions or academic lectures. It’s preserved by warriors. And
as Key knew firsthand, America’s warriors are not enemies of peace.

Goshen College had every right to make this decision, and
Harvard students have every right to share their opinions about America and
ISIS. Of course, those of us who disagree with them have the right to point out
how utterly misguided and unequivocally wrong these views are.

That’s how Reagan would respond. Reagan had no time for postmodernism’s
murky moral relativism. While others called for accommodation with communism,
Reagan dismissed communism as “a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose
last pages are even now being written” and declared,
“The West will not contain communism. It will transcend communism.”

HechallengedAmericans to use their heads as well as their hearts in trying to make sense of
the world around them, showing no qualms about calling evil by its name:
“Beware the temptation of…blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label
both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive
impulses of an evil empire.”

And he reminded us of a universal truth—that all uses of
force are not the same. During his 1984 D Day speech,
Reagan explained that the boys of Normandy—many of them the same age as those
surveyed at Harvard—had “the deep knowledge, and pray God we have not lost it, that
there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation
and the use of force for conquest.”

Indeed. There is a profound difference between the use of
force to annex Crimea and the use of force to liberate Kuwait, between the use
of force to seize islands in the South China Sea and the use of force to defend
the Baltics, between the use of force to attack a school in Peshawar and the
use of force to hunt down the attackers, between criminals and police, between ISIS
and America.

Thankfully, not everyone has succumbed to the postmodern pandemic, at least not
yet. Consider what happens on autumn Saturday afternoons just a couple hours
down the road from Goshen College. Purdue University takes a very different
stance when it comes to patriotic pregame rituals.

In 1966, amid the tumult surrounding the Vietnam War, a
local newspaper publisher encouraged Purdue University’s band director “to get
some patriotism into these kids,” as the Purdue University websiteexplains. The band director responded with these simple but stirring words,
which would be “spoken over an arrangement of ‘America the Beautiful’” during
the next home football game:

I am an American. That’s the way
most of us put it, just matter-of-factly. They are plain words, those four: you
could write them on your thumbnail, or sweep them across a bright autumn sky.
But remember too, that they are more than just words. They are a way of life.
So whenever you speak them, speak them firmly, speak them proudly, speak them
gratefully. I am an American!

The band director figured it was a one-time deal. But in
response to strong popular demand after the tribute was presented before a
national TV audience during the 1967 Rose Bowl, “I Am an American” became a
permanent pregame football tradition at Purdue University.

Almost five decades later, Purdue fans and visiting fans
alike are invited to read the words of “I Am an American” during the
pre-kickoff festivities of every home game—festivities which also include “The
Star Spangled Banner.” When the crowd roars those last four
words, it’s a reminder that America is a great and good nation—no matter what
the kids at Harvard are being taught.

*Dowd is a senior fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes The Dowd Report, a monthly review of international events and their impact on U.S. national security.